Tense and the native speaker

(Chapter reference: `The Parts of Speech')

I don't believe we can rely on people 'instinctively' using tenses correctly.  How many times do you hear 'double perfects' such as "I should have loved to have been there"? And how many people know the difference between "I should have loved to be there" and "I should love to have been there"?

 
If I were to come upon `I should love to have been there' in someone's writing, I'd ask the author whether she meant to say `I should have loved being there' or `I should love it if I had been there'.  My quarrel with this construction would centre on its failure to construct a clear object or complement. I'd have attributed the ambiguity in the construction to that failure. I doubt that I would have seen it as an issue of tense-construction. But now that you've put your perspective, I'm a little shaken.

.... it has struck me...where is the preposition? Has it gone the way of the clause?

Sophie Johnson:

There is a brief note above `The myth of word classes'. I have now included `propositions' in the Chapter index.

Max Sims:

 I may be old-fashioned, but I can't for the life of me work out how 'on the bridge' is an attribute of the man.  The phrase in no way describes him, it locates him, and must therefore be an prepositional phrase.   Or locative noun phrase? You almost say as much yourself in Chapter 1 under Copula model of the basic sentence.  Here, in the sentence 'He used to be in London', you have 'in London' as a locative noun phrase. If we put the sentences together to make 'The man on the bridge used to be in London', how then are the words in question described?

Sophie Johnson:

The concept `prepositional phrase' makes no sense to me beyond that a phrase can be one that begins with a preposition.

It is, I think, unequivocal that `on the bridge' in the sentence: `The man on the bridge used to be in London' either describes or identifies `the man' (nominative case), the subject in this sentences. (There is, of course, the problem of differentiating `naming' and `describing'; ref: Bertrand Russell. I touch on this in my discussion of adjectives and the comma.) It is impossible to call this sequence, which occurs in the subjective part of the sentence, a `locative noun phrase':  the locative case-function is a predicative, not a subjective, function. The locative noun phrase here is `in London'. 

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